Trump and Latin America: continuity and change

Abstract

The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency came as a shock to progressive governments and social movements south of the Rio Grande, particularly as it took place in the wake of a number of successes by conservative forces in the region, and at a time when there had already been a substantial strengthening of US efforts to reassert its hegemony: US-backed destabilisation plans had by then started to pay substantial dividends in a series of countries that had not long before been widely regarded as having broken from the Washington Consensus as part of an unstoppable Latin American dynamic. Thus, for example, in Brazil, President Dilma Roussef had been ousted in 2016, while in 2015 Argentina had elected as president a staunch neoliberal. All this had occurred during the presidency of a liberal Democrat (though one for most of the time battling against Republican majorities in the Congress). A Trump presidency was therefore an extremely sobering prospect, even though, during the electoral campaign itself, and as late as December 2016, Trump had portrayed himself as someone in favour of a non-interventionist US military policy, who rejected the idea of the US getting embroiled in foreign wars.